UNESCO/IHE - Ships making waves

UNESCO/IHE - Ships making waves

As super tankers, bulk carriers and container ships get ever bigger, so do the waves that they make. As these ships move through complex port areas with moored ships, or along banks and beaches where people are relaxing, dangerous situations arise, leading to broken moorings or personal injuries or even fatalities. Existing methods for predicting these ship waves and their impacts are incomplete in that they typically do not account for complex geometries.

In a recent development of the coastal model XBeach, the primary waves generated by such big ships can be predicted with accuracy, for arbitrary ship shapes and port or river geometries. What is more, in the same model the forces and moments on moored ships and the tsunami-like waves surging up a bank or beach can be simulated. This offers a wide range of applications, from designing mooring systems to predicting the ship-induced wave climate along wetlands or reducing the risk of accidents along navigation routes. XBeach software has been developed by UNESCO-IHE in cooperation with TU Delft, Deltares and other partners.